Oracle executives talked up on Thursday the planned Solaris 11 release due in 2011, with the Unix OS upgrade offering advancements in availability, security, and virtualization. The OS will feature next-generation networking capabilities for scalability and performance, said John Fowler, Oracle executive vice president of systems, at a company event in Santa Clara, Calif. "It's a complete reworking of [the] enterprise OS," he said. Oracle took over Solaris when the company acquired Sun Microsystems early this year.

I'm sure the above posters are right about a lot of it being a continuations of Sun's own developments prior to being acquired, but who's to say it's only been a year on Oracle's part. Lot's of the relevant code has been available to Oracle to play with since long before they absorbed Sun. It's entirely possible they were working on tweaks to the platform for their own ends, much like they've tailored some of RHEL's sources as a platform for their products.